Текст книги "Whiplash"

Автор книги: Dale Brown

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 31 страниц)

7

CIA Headquarters (Langley)

McLean, Virginia

FOR AN OFFICER WHO SPENT MOST OF HIS TIME IN THE FIELD, coming to CIA headquarters was not generally something to look forward to. Even if one wasn’t coming home to be called on the carpet, the stay tended toward the onerous. For one thing, it was almost always associated with paperwork: official reports, expense reports, and briefings. Then there were the routine and not routine lie detector tests, dreaded audits, and the even more dreaded physical and psychological fitness exams.

But perhaps the worst thing that could happen to you at Langley, at least as far as Nuri Lupo was concerned, was being second-guessed. Which he expected was on today’s agenda in bulleted capital letters. He’d taken it as a particularly bad sign when Reid told him to take the weekend off. Reid himself always worked Saturdays, so a routine pummeling could easily have started then. Anything that had to wait for the work week to begin was guaranteed to be onerous indeed.

Not that there was really much to second-guess him on. But of course, that was never the point.

Nuri’s only consolation—and it was thin—was the fact that he had found a restaurant with a cute waitress the night before. She’d flirted a bit, and he figured he’d be eating there a lot if he was stuck here for any length of time.

He drove to the parking lot near the main building, parked in one of the visitor’s slots, and went inside to meet Reid. He was a few minutes early, and after going through the ID and weapons check—guns were frowned on—he decided to head down the hall and grab a coffee at the Starbucks. Along the way he passed the displays of Cold War paraphernalia. Though put out mostly to impress visiting VIPs, Nuri found the old gadgets endlessly fascinating, and lingered on his way back, admiring the miniature bugs in the cases, huge by today’s standards.

Reid, coming down from the other direction, spotted Nuri in the hall. He paused and studied the agent, surprised at how young he looked. He was, in fact, young, though Reid would never hold that against him.

It was nearly impossible for the older man not to draw parallels with officers and agents he’d known in the past, and his mind did so freely in the few seconds that passed before Nuri looked up and saw him waiting at the end of the hall. The young man reminded him of several people, all good men, all dead well before their time. The comparison that came most readily was to Journevale—Reid remembered the agent’s code name, not his Christian name, even as he pictured him.

Journevale was a Filipino who’d been recruited by the British to work in Vietnam and at some point was handed over to the U.S. During the time Reid knew him, he’d lived among the Hmong people in Laos, helping organize guerrilla groups that fought along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

When Reid wanted to check on his status, he had to parachute in via Air America. The flights in rickety airplanes, held together by duct tape and wire, were horribly dangerous; jumping out of the plane at night into the dark jungle wasn’t much of a picnic, either. In the days before GPS satellite locators, it could take hours to find a contact in the jungle; Reid twice failed to meet his agent at the landing zone and had to hike several miles to a backup rendezvous point. But Journevale always managed to meet him, even when the pilots had gone far off course. He was good with languages, and cheery, and best of all, he could cook murderously well. The tribespeople worshipped him.

He’d killed himself in a Bangkok hotel room after the war was lost and his people were slaughtered. It was the honorable thing to do.

“Hey, Bossman,” said Nuri. “Sorry I’m late. I just grabbed a cup of joe. The coffee I’ve been drinking’s lousy. Everybody wants to put sugar in it.”

“Let’s go, then.”

“Where to? Your office?”

“Yours.”

Nuri realized he meant Room 4, the support project headquarters. That was a bit of a surprise.

“I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about Jasmine,” said Nuri as they got into Reid’s car outside. “I have some ideas on how I can get inside.”

“Why would Luo be so important that he had to be killed?” asked Reid.

The tone in his voice told Nuri that Reid already had a theory. But his supervisor liked the Socratic method of quizzing his underlings before lowering the boom.

“Competitor wants the market to himself.”

“Possible. Other theories?”

“He pissed off the wrong person,” said Nuri. “They got him back.”

“Plausible.”

“Or the Egyptians killed him. They’re becoming more active. They see the rebels as a threat, and want to keep them off balance. You take out Luo, you deprive them of ammo for a few months.”

“Also plausible.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I have no opinion, really. It’s going to be your next step to find out more information. The analysts have finished going over the data,” Reid added, almost as an afterthought. “The tubes could not have been used for rockets.”

“OK. And where are they?”

“That’s the next thing you have to find out.”

Room 4 was located on the opposite end of the campus, but even so, the drive took only a few minutes. There was no parking lot there; they had to park near a larger building about fifty yards away.

Reid turned off the ignition but didn’t get out of the car.

“We’re going to expand your team,” he told Nuri.

“Expand?”

“As I told you when you started. The Whiplash concept calls for more people.”

“Mmmmm,” said Nuri.

“We have a new officer who’s going to be in charge.”

“In charge of me?”

It was a reasonable—more than reasonable—question. Reid ducked it, though. “Not precisely.”

“The operation.”

“The operation remains a CIA mission.”

“So what’s his role?”

“He’ll be in charge of the paramilitary component.”

“I’m paramilitary.”

“In the sense I mean,” said Reid, “they are DOD, and you are CIA.”

“And independent?”

“No one is independent, Nuri. You know that.”

Reid opened the car door. Nuri took a sip of his coffee, then left the cup in the car.

“What’s that mean, exactly?” he asked Reid, catching up to him.

“It means Agency and military people work together. You’ve been there before.”

“Generally, there’s someone specifically in charge.”

“I’m in charge. And Ms. Stockard.”

Politics, thought Nuri. They were probably haggling about the real chain of command above him, each agency trying to protect its turf. Generally that meant no one was in charge, a potentially dangerous situation.

“I think you’ll like the man we’ve chosen. He was in the Air Force. He worked at Dreamland.”

“Air Force? He’s a pilot?”

“No, he was with the original Whiplash. Danny Freah. He’s a colonel.”

It all fit together for Nuri. Breanna Stockard—a very nice woman, though in his opinion a fish out of water as a manager, far too laid back—was recreating her past glory by surrounding herself with fellow Dreamland alums. Even the name of the project, Whiplash, was the same.

He clamped his mouth shut. There was no sense complaining.

They cleared security quickly. Nuri shivered slightly as they descended—the closed-in stairwell reminded him of the labyrinth beneath the Coliseum.

“Jonathon, good morning,” said Breanna Stockard, who was waiting just beyond the nano wall as they came in. “Mr. Lupo, good to see you again.”

“You can call me Nuri.”

“Nuri, this is Danny Freah. Colonel, Nuri Abaajmed Lupo. He’s been overseas for a while. Still jet-lagged?”

“I’m over it,” said Nuri. Danny was younger than he’d expected.

Ray Rubeo was standing in the corner, arms crossed. “Mr. Lupo, good morning,” he said.

“Hey, Doc.”

“I trust the gear is working satisfactorily?”

“You might make the bulletproof vest thicker.”

“Resistant. It’s resistant, not bulletproof,” said Rubeo in his world-weary voice. “Any thicker and you wouldn’t be able to wear it beneath your clothes.”

“You should work on it.”

Rubeo frowned. “I have a few things to attend to,” he told Breanna. “Text me if you need me.”

“I thought we would begin with an informal briefing on the situation in the Sudan for Colonel Freah,” said Reid after the scientist left. “And then Ms. Stockard and I will expound on what we see as the next step, both for the project, and for Whiplash.”

“Sure,” said Nuri.

“Why don’t we go inside?” suggested Breanna. “We’ll be more comfortable.”

“The Sudan is the incarnation of hell on earth,” started Reid. He’d prepared a brief PowerPoint, which the computer system presented on the cube at the center of the room. “The country has been in and out of revolt forever. The various factions have different grievances and aims. Our interests are not directly tied up in any of them. We were drawn there because of an arms selling network known as Jasmine.”

Some part of Sudan or another had been involved in civil war since before the country gained independence in 1956. The wars had various causes, though the outcome was uniform: the majority of the people suffered, while a few tribal and religious leaders managed to eke out a marginally better existence. Darfur, in the west, had occupied the world’s attention in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Now things were flaring in the eastern borderlands with Ethiopia. The Sudanese government was dominated by Arab-speaking Muslims; the rebels were a mixture of different tribes and ethnic groups. Arabic was their common language; many of the elite and even a number of peasants could manage reasonable English.

Reid turned his attention to the arms dealers who made much of the bloodshed possible. He noted that Jasmine, like many of its brethren, was a loose association of people who moved things around the world, mostly from Africa to Europe. He mentioned the aluminum tubes, and their possible connection to nuclear weapons. Finally he came to Luo’s assassination, a professional job that suggested the game Jasmine was involved in had very high stakes.

Nuri, not necessarily convinced of this, wondered if Reid knew something about the assassin he didn’t. Meg Leary was a pro, which meant that whoever hired her had a reasonably decent amount of money. Nuri thought it was a rival trying to move in, even though he hadn’t seen any evidence of this yet. But it could also be a government.

Had the U.S. hired her? That made no sense to him, but he had to admit it might be a possibility. Reid surely would have told him, or at least hinted more strongly.

Maybe Luo double-crossed the Iranians, who were the source of most of the money the rebels had in the Sudan. Or maybe the Israelis didn’t like him for some reason. They tended to do their own assassinations, but weren’t above outsourcing when it was convenient.

“Luo’s assassination brings us back to square one,” said Reid. “We want to take another look at the rebel groups in the Sudan, and possibly find another way into Jasmine.”

“Why not track the murderer?” asked Danny Freah.

Nuri smiled. He knew he was going to resent working with anyone, but at least this fellow thought like he did.

“That’s impractical,” said Reid. “She’s a professional. It’s unlikely she’ll yield much information.”

“You’re protecting her?” said Danny.

“She wasn’t working for us, Colonel. We don’t know who she was working for. Nuri has some theories.”

Nuri shrugged. “I would have preferred to do it that way, too,” he told Danny. “But it didn’t work out.”

“So what happens now?” Danny asked.

Nuri turned to Reid.

“Originally, Mr. Lupo was able to work in Ethiopia.”

“That won’t work anymore,” said Nuri. “Jasmine used a café in Addis Abba. I bugged the place. But unfortunately, the owner was arrested a few days later and the café was closed down. The smugglers are staying out of there for the most part, because the government’s cracking down.”

“So we’ll have to work directly in the Sudan,” said Reid. “And given the situation there, Nuri could use some protection and backup.”

“Which is where Whiplash comes in,” said Danny.

“That’s exactly the way it’s supposed to work,” said Breanna.

She looked over at Nuri and could tell he was apprehensive. She couldn’t blame him. He’d never worked with Danny and didn’t know what to expect.

“Do you think you can bug the rebels in the Sudan?” she asked him.

“Yeah, of course,” said Nuri. “I’ve already checked the area out.”

He had been through the area earlier. He’d also worked a little with the simulator, which presented 3-D models and conjured situations to practice infiltrating an area. But Nuri had found that real life, at least in the Sudan villages, was much too messy for the computers to model correctly. He’d already decided he wouldn’t bother trying to model the next mission there.

“What’s the goal here?” asked Danny. “How much is it to test MY-PID, this computer thing, and how much to find out what these Jasmine people were doing with the aluminum tubes?”

“Actually, to find out who got the tubes and what they’re doing with them,” said Nuri. “Jasmine was just the conduit.”

“I’d say, Colonel, that the tubes are much more important than the technology at this point,” said Reid. “It’s there to help, nothing more. If the tubes are being used to process nuclear material, that’s an extremely serious situation.”

“Who the hell would process the material in the Sudan?” said Danny.

“That’s exactly what we want to find out,” answered Reid.

“RELATIVELY PAINLESS, WASN’T IT?” ASKED REID AS THEY drove back to the administration building.

“I guess.”

“I think you and the colonel will get along fine.”

“He thinks he’s in charge,” said Nuri.

“Keep your ego in check, Nuri.”

Nuri frowned and reached for his coffee. It was still warm.

“Do you want some time off?” Reid asked.

“I don’t need it.”

“Good. You’re booked on a flight out to Paris tomorrow night. You can connect from the there to Egypt.”

“Fine.”

Nuri began mentally checking off what he’d have to do. They’d need a cover, first of all. And gear. He could get most of it in Alexandria.

“You’ve done very well, Nuri,” said Reid as he parked. “Luo’s death was not your fault.”

“Thanks.”

“One more thing before you go,” said Reid. “Accounting needs to talk to you about some expenses.”

8

Port Sudan, Sudan

Ten days later

DANNY FREAH PULLED HIS YELLOW BASEBALL CAP LOWER as the boat approached the pier. He stepped up toward the bow, holding his bag tightly against his leg as someone jostled against his side. The small ferry had set out hours earlier from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. When it left the dock there, the sun was about at eye level over the water; now it was long gone, sunk into the gray mass of Africa.

The passengers crowding Danny were mostly poor Sudanese returning from work. There were a few pilgrims mixed in, devout Muslims who had performed the hajj, or holy trek, to Mecca. The rest were operators, thieves, and pretenders.

Danny fell firmly into the last camp. His passport and papers declared that he was a doctor of paleontology, a claim backed up with several official letters from the Sudanese and Egyptian governments. Each seal had been bought for five thousand dollars cash, a price high enough for him to consider turning them over to a legitimate paleontologist when his job here was done.

Except few legitimate paleontologists would dare travel to the Sudan.

“How’s the dock look?” Danny muttered.

“Rephrase question,” answered the Voice.

He pushed the earphone in his right ear a little deeper. Though designed specifically for his ears, the plugs didn’t feel very comfortable.

“Are there armed men on the dock?” he asked.

“Affirmative. Six guards within customs area. Additional men beyond the gate. One armored car.”

“Why do they need the armored car?”

“Rephrase question.”

Danny didn’t bother. He had been using the MY-PID “appliance” for several days, but it still felt uncomfortable. Nor had it been particularly useful. He knew where he was going and what to do. The Voice’s contribution to his mission so far had been to tell him how warm it was and how unlikely it was to rain.

He squeezed his eyes together, fighting off fatigue. He’d flown from Cairo via Rome with barely an hour stopover, and from there to Saudi Arabia. Immediately on landing he’d rented a car and driven halfway across the country to the ferry. All told, he’d spent roughly eighteen hours traveling. He’d napped for a little less than four hours during the first flight. Those were the most he’d had in a row since starting his new assignment.

Searchlights flashed on above the pier as the ferry closed in. Through the glare, Danny saw men armed with automatic rifles waiting for the ship to dock. Behind them was the armored car the Voice had mentioned.

Danny gripped his bag as the ferry bumped against the dock. A deckhand sprung across, tying the ship to the wharf. Another removed the spar from the rail and stepped back. People began jumping across. Danny waited until it was clear that the boat wasn’t getting any closer, then leapt as well, crossing over to the worn wooden planks.

The rickety dock was bisected by a metal fence that enclosed the customs and passport control areas. To get into Sudan, a visitor or resident had to queue in the single line that started at the center of the fence and spread willy-nilly in front of it. Occasionally, a customs officer or one of the soldiers guarding them attempted to form the wedge-shaped mass into order, but it was hardly worth the effort; as soon as one person moved forward, the order collapsed, and the crowd once more jockeyed for position.

Like nearly everyone who’d gotten off the ferry, Danny was black. But his fresh, Western-style clothes and confident manner stood out from the others as sharply as if his skin had been green. One of the customs officers waved at him, calling him around the press of the line. He had Danny walk to a chained gate at the far end of the pier. One of the soldiers accompanied him, glancing backward every few seconds to make sure none of the other passengers followed.

They didn’t. While a few were jealous that a foreigner would be allowed to cut in line, they also knew the reason. The foreigner represented money, to both the customs agent who would expect a “fee” for the convenience, and to the country, which collected for an instant visa whether he had one already or not.

The natives watching, on the other hand, were merely a nuisance.

“Papers,” said the customs officer.

Danny reached into his pocket for his passport. He’d been well-schooled on the procedure; inside the passport was a crisp hundred dollar bill.

The bill disappeared into the agent’s palm so quickly Danny thought it had been vacuumed up his sleeve.

“What is your purpose here?” asked the man in English.

“I am on a dig,” said Danny. “We’re looking for dinosaurs.”

“Hmph.” The customs agent could not have been less interested. “That bag is all you have?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Open it, please.”

He gestured toward a table nearby. Danny had been told that once he gave the official the bribe, he would be waved through. Now he started to feel apprehensive. He had no money for a second bribe.

The customs agent stood over him as he unzipped the small black case. He was not looking for additional money, but rather, doing his job. In his mind, the hundred dollar bill was a tip from a beneficent westerner, accepted custom rather than corruption. It would not influence him one way or another. If he found any contraband—literature against the regime, a gun, drugs of any sort, including prescription medicine—he would arrest the American.

The bag contained a change of clothes, extra socks, and two pairs of sunglasses. Nothing illegal.

“You are listening to an iPod?” asked the official, pointing to the headphone.

“It’s off.” Danny showed him the control unit. He worried for a second that the officer would take it, but he merely frowned at the device.

“Go,” the man said, dismissing him with a wave.

Danny made his way off the pier, ducking his eyes from the glare of the lights. The rotten fish smell of the seaside gave way to the scent of rotting meat. Crates of goats were stacked along the path that ran from the pier into the start of the city. The animals bleated and moaned, hoping they might convince someone to let them roam the port. Peddlers huddled near the end of the fence, selling various wares. Anything that wasn’t on display, said a crude sign in Arabic, could be obtained.

A stocky black man in a long Arab robe approached Danny from the cluster of people milling near the entrance. Danny saw him from the corner of his eye and tensed.

“Welcome to the hell-hole capital of the world,” said Ben “Boston” Rockland as he took Danny’s elbow. “Our ride’s this way.”

“How you doing, Boston?”

“Good. I was beginning to think you’d never get here.”

“Me, too.”

“Don’t use too much English around here. The natives are pretty restless as it is.”

Boston had been in Port Sudan for several hours, more than enough time to form an impression of the place. He had seen two muggings in that time, one by a police officer. There surely would have been more, but most of the people in the city were too poor to bother robbing.

“The thing is, this is the good part of the Sudan,” he told Danny, leading him toward the bus they had leased.

DANNY AND BOSTON HAD FIRST MET AT DREAMLAND SOME fifteen years ago, when Boston replaced one of the original members of Whiplash who’d been killed during an operation. Though the sergeant had an impressive record, he also had what some of his superiors politely termed “issues with authority.” He’d seen action in the first Iraq war, where he served as a pararescuer. He’d also done time as a combat air controller and was “loaned” to the Marines under a special program that put combat veterans on the front lines with other services. But Boston had also nearly come to blows with at least two officers in the past three years, one of whom pressed but then dropped formal charges against him.

“A misunderstanding,” said the captain on the record. Off the record, the captain called Boston a hothead but said he’d also saved three men in combat the day after the incident, and so the captain decided to forget the matter out of gratitude.

Serving with Danny and Colonel Bastian had changed Boston’s perspective considerably. He still thought most officers were jerks. But he also knew that there was an important minority who weren’t. That knowledge had helped Boston advance after Whiplash was disbanded. He was now a chief master sergeant, a veritable capo di capo in the military’s chain of command.

It hadn’t been easy wresting Boston away from his assignment, a cushy job as senior Air Force enlisted man in Germany. Not because he didn’t want to go—he started packing as soon as Danny gave him the outlines of what he was up to. Boston’s commanding officer, however, put a premium on his chiefs, especially those whose extensive combat experience made them instant father figures for the “kids” in the unit. Danny had to get General Magnus involved; fortunately, Magnus had been responsible for one of the CO’s early promotions, and eased Boston’s transfer as a personal favor.

After the briefest introduction possible to the new Whiplash concept, Boston had shipped out to the Sudan to scout out locations for a base. Danny remained in the States, recruiting more members and arranging for their gear.

“You’re going to love this bus,” said Boston. “Got a port-a-john and everything.”

“As long as it runs.”

“Walks more than runs. But it’ll get us there. When’s the rest of the team showing up?”

“Couple of days.”

“Nuri’s waiting for us. Interesting fellow.”

“Why’s that?” asked Danny.

“Just interesting. Knows a bunch of stuff. Pretty good cook.”

“Yeah?”

“You should taste what he does with goat and garlic.”

“Can’t wait,” said Danny.

“You’re also going to need this.”

Boston held out a pistol. It was a large Dessert Eagle, more than twenty years old.

“Got it in town,” he said. “Everything else I saw was just peashooters, .22s and revolvers, pretty useless to stop anyone. I figured it would do until we’re settled. No spare ammo, though.”

Danny took the weapon in his hand. The pistol had a heft to it that made it a clearly serious weapon. Chambered for .44 Magnum, it held eight rounds and could stop anything lighter than an elephant in its tracks.

He slid the gun under his belt, tucking it beneath his jacket.

The bus was an old French municipal bus, converted to private service. It came with a driver, Amid Abul, an Arab who had lived in Derudeb for ten years, occasionally hiring himself out to the CIA as a driver and local “consultant.” Nuri had hired him to provide transportation to their base in the hills to the south, and to help in whatever capacity seemed practical.

Nuri had dealt with Abul before, but even he didn’t fully trust him; it would have been foolish to do so. Though as the owner of a bus, he was relatively well off, the inhabitants of the war-torn country were so poor that most would gladly give up a relative to a sworn enemy for a year’s supply of food and water. Nuri had given Abul a cover story, telling him that his friends were paleontologists. Abul, who knew Nuri was CIA, was smart enough not to ask any questions.

Danny kept up pretenses by asking whether he had ever seen any bones in the sands nearby.

“Plenty of bones, Doctor,” answered Abul. “But all of men.”

The buildings and houses they passed were mostly black shapes barely discernible in the darkness of the night. They faded as the bus wound its way beyond the city, illusions conjured by a stage manager designed to convince an audience that Port Sudan was a real place.

The landscape, harsh and mostly barren during the day, looked surreal at night, the endless darkness punctuated by black stalks and hulking mounds, silhouettes of gray hills and mountains.

After about an hour and a half, Danny began to relax. There was almost no traffic on the road, though it was the only highway to the south from the coast. It was easy to believe they were the only people left on earth.

The area was warm, but not as warm as he’d thought it would be; the night became more pleasant as they left the moist air of the coast. The mountains and foothills of the eastern part of the country received much more rain than the desert to the west. While the fields and hillsides were hardly lush at this time of year, grass, shrubs, and trees grew in the thin but well-drained soil. Here and there farms made a stab at civilizing the land.

Danny felt his eyes start to close. He shifted often, shaking himself, trying to stay as alert as possible.

Boston had no trouble staying awake. He’d been drinking coffee practically nonstop since arriving in Africa, but it wasn’t the caffeine that made his muscles buzz. The idea of being back in action after so many years thrilled him.

As far as he was concerned, he’d spent the last few years as a mascot for the Air Force brass. He’d had plenty of responsibility, but responsibility and action were two different things. His job really didn’t call for him to do all that much. The men and women he directly supervised were mostly chiefs or senior NCOs themselves.

It had been years since he’d really done anything. The elite nature of the units he’d served in meant that even the lowest person on the totem pole not only knew his job, but did it in textbook fashion. Boston had sometimes perversely hoped that a screw-up would find his or her way to the unit; it would give him a project.

All of this might have been a tribute to his organizational and leadership skills—or maybe just colossal good luck—but in truth Boston was not comfortable with the role that had settled on him: that of father figure. He had always looked up to the chief master sergeants he’d known; even in the few cases where he didn’t respect the men, he always admired the rank. But becoming chief made him feel not so much honored and respected as simply old. He didn’t mind the kids at all, and having people jump when you said boo was easy to get used to. But there was also a kind of distance between him and the others that made him uncomfortable. He felt as if he was always on stage, a plastic role model who could not deviate from what preconceived notion the audience had. Inside, he knew he was just good old Ben “Boston” Rockland, tough kid from the streets, snake eater ready for action…not the rocking chair.

Being with Colonel Freah—several times he’d come close to calling him captain, as he’d been in the old days—made him a snake eater again. Just being called Boston felt good.

Not that Danny hadn’t changed. There was a hint of gray in the hair that curled at his temples. He’d also mellowed, slightly at least, over the years. Danny had always run him particularly hard, trying to prove that just because they were both black, he wasn’t cutting him any slack. Now they were more like old friends.

The bus’s headlamps caught a black shadow in the road as they came out of a sharp curve. There was a truck in the road.

“Shit,” muttered Boston.

Danny, who’d been dozing, jerked awake.

“Can you get around it?” Boston asked the driver.

“I don’t know,” said Abul, downshifting. He left his right foot hovering over the gas and used his left foot to slow and work the clutch.

“Somebody behind us, too,” said Boston. “This ain’t no coincidence.”

The truck’s lights came on ahead of them. It was a military vehicle. Two men with berets stepped in front of the lights, arms raised to stop them. They had M-16 rifles.

“This is the army?” said Danny.

Abul shrugged. It was impossible to know who was stopping them. The reason, though, was easy to predict—they wanted money.

“I see six,” said Boston, who was looking behind them. “I think we can make it past them.”

Danny leaned forward, trying to see beyond the truck in the road. It was blocking most but not all of the highway. There was a deep ditch to the left. They might make it past, he thought, but they might also fall into the ditch and tumble over. The road curved to the right a short distance beyond the army truck, and there was no way to see what might be there.

“What are these guys going to ask for?” Danny asked Abul.

“Money.”

“What if we shoot them?” said Boston.